"Your Genes: How They Contribute to Who You Are" is the theme of the 2013 Penn State Lectures on the Frontiers of Science, which will take place in January and February. This series of six public lectures on consecutive Saturday mornings is designed as a free minicourse for the general public. The lectures will take place from 11 a.m. to about 12:30 p.m., in 100 Thomas Building on the Penn State University Park campus, beginning Jan. 19. More information is available at http://science.psu.edu/frontiers.

An animal scientist in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences played a role in the first complete sequencing of the pig genome by an international team of researchers. The study, conducted by the International Swine Genome Sequencing Consortium, provides a genetic comparison of the domesticated pig and its wild cousins.

The research, described in the cover article of the Nov. 15 issue of the journal Nature, offers clues about how the animal evolved. The article is available at http://psu.ag/SHjXHu. Wansheng Liu, associate professor of animal genomics in the Department of Animal Science, participated in the study, which includes comparisons of the human, mouse, dog, horse, cow and pig genomes.

The first integrated understanding of how the human genome functions will be published this week -- the triumphant result of a collaborative five-year project called ENCODE, involving more than 440 researchers working in 32 labs worldwide. Penn State's contribution to the ENCODE project involves using the new ENCODE data to help explain how genetic variants that do not affect the structure of encoded proteins could affect a person's susceptibility to disease. The research findings are a significant advance in understanding the precise and complex controls over the expression of genetic information within a cell.

A novel technique has been developed and demonstrated at Penn State to map the proteins that read and regulate chromosomes -- the string-like structures inside cells that carry genes. The specific order in which these proteins attach DNA-containing nucleosomes along the chromosome determines whether a brain cell, a liver cell, or a cancer cell is formed. Until now, it has been exceedingly difficult to determine exactly where such proteins bind to the chromosome, and therefore how they work. The new technique precisely pinpoints their location, and has the potential to take high-resolution snapshots of proteins as they regulate or miss-regulate an entire genome. The research will be published today as an Advance Online Publication in the journal Nature. Related research by the Penn State scientists recently was published in the journal Cell.

Galaxy -- an open-source, Web-based platform for data-intensive biomedical and genetic research -- is now available as a cloud computing resource. A team of researchers has developed the new technology, which will help scientists and biomedical researchers to harness such tools as DNA-sequencing and analysis software, as well as storage capacity for large quantities of scientific data.

Both climate change and humans were responsible for the extinction of some large, cold-adapted, plant-eating mammals, according to research that is the first of its kind to use genetic, archeological, and climatic data together to infer the population history of large-bodied Ice-Age mammals. The research will be published in the journal Nature.

The study's findings are expected to shed light on the possible fates of living species of mammals as our planet continues its current warming cycle. Beth Shapiro, the Shaffer Associate Professor of Biology at Penn State University, is a member of the research team. High-resolution images are online athttp://www.science.psu.edu/news-and-events/2011-news/Shapiro10-2011

The molecular mechanisms that control genetic modifications in specific tissues during plant development are the focus of a National Science Foundation grant for $1.2 million to Surinder Chopra, associate professor of maize genetics in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences.

A revolutionary species-preservation approach based on whole-genome analyses of two Tasmanian devils -- one that had died of a contagious cancer known as Devil Facial Tumor Disease (DFTD) and one healthy animal -- has been used to develop a theoretical model to predict which individuals would need to be kept in captivity to maximize chances of preserving enough genetic diversity for the species to survive.

The research helps to formulate one possible plan of action to prevent the extinction of the Tasmanian devil -- a marsupial found in the wild exclusively in the Australian island-state of Tasmania. The research model also may be extended to other endangered species.

Scientists at Penn State have used large-scale DNA sequencing data to investigate, for the first time, a longstanding evolutionary assumption: that DNA mutation rates are influenced by life-history traits, including metabolic rate and the length of time between generations. The research team found, for example, a higher rate of DNA mutations in the male sperm versus the female egg. One of the many implications of this research is that life-history traits of extinct species now could be discoverable.

Scientists at Penn State have achieved a major milestone in the attempt to assemble, in a test tube, entire chromosomes from their component parts. The achievement reveals the process a cell uses to package the basic building blocks of an organism's entire genetic code -- its genome. The evidence provided by early research with the new procedure overturns three previous theories of the genome-packaging process and opens the door to a new era of genome-wide biochemistry research. A paper describing the team's achievement will be published in the journal Science on May 20.

A massive database cataloging the human genome's functional elements -- including genes, RNA transcripts and other products -- is being made available as an open resource to the scientific community, classrooms, science writers and the public, thanks to an international team of researchers. In a paper published in the journal PLoS Biology on April 19, the project -- called ENCODE (Encyclopedia Of DNA Elements) -- provides an overview of the team's ongoing efforts to interpret the human genome sequence, as well as a guide for using the vast amounts of data and resources produced so far by the project.

The evolution and diversification of the more than 300,000 living species of flowering plants may have been "jump started" much earlier than previously calculated, a new study indicates. According to Claude dePamphilis, a professor of biology at Penn State and the lead author of the study, which includes scientists at six universities, two major upheavals in the plant genome occurred hundreds of millions of years ago -- nearly 200 million years earlier than the events that other research groups had described. The research also indicates that these upheavals produced thousands of new genes that may have helped drive the evolutionary explosion that led to the rich diversity of present-day flowering plants. The study, which provides a wealth of new genetic data and a more precise evolutionary time scale, is expected to change the way biologists view the family trees of plants in general and flowering plants in particular. To see photos associated with this research, visit http://live.psu.edu/flickrset/72157626350083355 online. The research findings were posted on the early-online website of the journal Nature on April 10, and later will be published in the journal.

Clifford Tabin, a professor in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and also the chairman of the department, will present the Russell Marker Lectures in Evolutionary Biology on March 14 and 15 on Penn State's University Park campus. The free public lectures are sponsored by the Penn State Eberly College of Science. The series includes a lecture intended for a general audience titled "Revisiting Evolutionary Examples Used by Darwin: New Insights in the Varied Beaks of Darwin's Finches and Regressive Evolution in Cave Fish" at 5 p.m. on Monday, March 14. Tabin also will give a more specialized lecture titled "Evolution and Development of Gut and Limb Pattern" at 4 p.m. on Tuesday, March 15. Both lectures will take place in the Berg Auditorium, 100 Life Sciences Building.

The scientists who put an innovative "tree of life" online last year now have made that same resource available -- for free -- for iPhone users. The new "TimeTree" application lets anyone with an Apple iPhone harness a vast Internet storehouse of data about the diversity of life, from bacteria to humans. The intuitive interface is designed to answer a simple question, quickly and authoritatively: how long ago did species A and species B share a common ancestor?